Thursday, November 21, 2002

I'm reading Soon We Will Not Cry, a biography of civil rights activist Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, with my women's history class. The courage of the activists of the early 1960s is remarkable. I already had some mental image of the lunch-counter sit-ins but none of what it was like to be arrested at a sit in and go to jail for 30 or 60 days. I notice how much nonviolence was about accepting pain, choosing pain, in order to stand up for what is right. Turning the other cheek doesn't mean giving up on justice (a camp counselor with lots of Christian ideas told my son that he should respond to teasing by turning the other cheek, and I struggled to explain why that was wrong).